


We Are Still Human, When the Morning Comes

by melonbug



Series: If This Be the End, Then So Shall it Be [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, after the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 09:45:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10784340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbug/pseuds/melonbug
Summary: It was over.They had all the time in the world.





	We Are Still Human, When the Morning Comes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mellisah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mellisah/gifts).



Pidge was smiling, Keith was  _ sure _ , beneath the bright scarf pulled up over her mouth and nose. It was green, a bright spill of color against the otherwise barren and dying landscape around them. She dropped her bag and it spilled a cloud of red dust into the air. It painted a picture of her laughter, sad and tired. “Here we are,” she said. She looked his way. Among the layers of scarves and the halo of her hair, her eyes were the only visible part of her face. They told the story they both shared. They had seen as much as Keith’s had seen. “Back where it all started.”

Back where it all started: The cramped little shack in the desert where Keith had spent the better part of a year slowly losing his sanity. It felt like lifetimes ago. It  _ was  _ lifetimes ago.

“How long do you think it’s been?” Keith asked, looking it over. The years had not been kind to it, but it was still  _ there _ . One wall had caved in and another was half down, support by the other two still-standing walls. The elements had invaded it at some point, and cracked earth and fine red sand filled it. The wood was bleached and cracking, large splinters cutting into the air.

“Hard to say,” Pidge murmured stepping over towards it. “It was already in rough shape to begin with.”

Keith laughed. He was all too aware.

Pidge kicked at a beam that jutted up from the ground. It groaned. “I don’t know,” she continued. “Looks like a strong wind might bring the rest of it down. Maybe a hundred years? Maybe a  _ few _ hundred years?”

By the time they’d realized they were no longer aging normally, that the years spent in space were  _ hundreds _ of years passing on earth, it had been too late.

“Hard to say,” Keith agreed. He looked towards the horizon, where the sun was slowly beginning to set. Somewhere beyond it was what remained of the Garrison: a crater in the cracked, dead earth, filled with the crumbling asphalt that had once paved the roads, filled with the concrete that had once been runways and the foundations of the buildings, filled with the rusted remnants of what had once been a military might.

_ What do you think did this? _ Keith had asked, when they’d first seen it. They both knew the answer with just one glance, but it was a hard answer to swallow.

Pidge had looked across the landscape and the fractured red clay and he had seen the frown through her eyes.  _ Bombs _ .

They’d spent so much time worrying about what the Galra might do to their home planet, that they’d never stopped to think what humanity might do to it first. War left no corner of the universe untouched. But now Zarkon was dead. Lotor was dead. Haggar,  _ finally _ , was dead. What else was there to be done once the Galra empire had been dismantled? What was their new purpose?

Keith raised his head to the sky. It was ashen where it had once been blue. It painted a picture of the world they had come home to, just the two of them. They had been the only two willing to return, if only for a little while.

Pidge strode over, tugging down her scarves. She smiled. “Where do you want to start?” she asked. She reached out and he met her halfway, catching her hands in his own. “We have all the time in the world.”

He considered her, then the tangle of wood behind her. “Rebuild it, maybe?”

She tossed it a glance. “There’s plenty to be salvaged from the Garrison. We can make our own little shack. It’s gonna be a far cry from the two bed, two bath, white picket fence I imagined in my youth, but it’ll do.”

Keith chuckled. “It’ll do,” he agreed. “Then maybe we can piece it all together?”

“Yeah,” she breathed, meeting his eyes. “There’s a story to be told here, and there’s no one left to tell it but us.”

All around them, the desert was silent.

They had all the time in the world.


End file.
